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Episode details

Radio 4,23 Feb 2016,15 mins

Mark Lawson talks to Adam Mars-Jones

One to One

Available for over a year

Mark Lawson has a problem. He is writing a memoir but he's always had the habit, when writing or broadcasting, of avoiding the first person pronoun. This rather puts him at odds with modern culture. Journalists and presenters are urged to use the one-letter vertical word. Bloggers, Vloggers and Tweeters lay their lives on-line and autobiography is an ever more crowded literary form. So in his series of One to One, Mark takes the opportunity to discuss self-revelation with artists who - in various ways - have taken themselves as their subject-matter, starting with the writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones. Long admired for his fiction and criticism, Adam has just published a work of non-fiction, Kid Gloves, which describes the experience of becoming end-of-life carer to his father, a retired judge, Sir William Mars-Jones. Mark and Adam reflect on the honesty and self knowledge needed when writing about your own life. Producer: Lucy Lunt.

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